Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "The Christian Science Monitor reports that once again, the Obama administration has pushed back a final decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline possibly delaying the final determination until after the November midterm elections. In announcing the delay, the State Department cited a Nebraska Supreme Court case that could affect the route of the pipeline that may not be decided until next year, as well as additional time needed to review 2.5 million public comments on the project. Both supporters and opponents of the pipeline criticized the delay as a political ploy. Democratic incumbents from oil-rich states have urged President Obama to approve the pipeline but approving the pipeline before the election could staunch the flow of money from liberal donors and fund-raisers who oppose the project. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell said in a statement that "at a time of high unemployment in the Obama economy, it's a shame that the administration has delayed the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline for years." Activists say its construction could devastate the environment, but several State Department reviews have concluded that the pipeline would be safe and was unlikely to significantly increase the rate of carbon pollution in the atmosphere. Even if the pipeline was canceled, it said, the oil sands crude was likely to be extracted and brought to market by other means, such as rail, and then processed and burned."

Every action that increases the cost of gasoline increases the profit in producing it.

What the anti oil people have failed to grasp is that they're making the oil companies rich at everyone else's expense.

If I didn't know better, I'd think the whole anti oil campaign were a conspiracy by the oil companies to raise prices. Because that has been the result.

We are only getting fracking in the first place because oil got expensive enough to justify the practice. If oil were cheaper then there would be no fracking.

Increase the cost further and see what happens next. But it won't be the green revolution.

Long story short, batteries are what is holding back green technology. Batteries are shit. Until that changes the green revolution will mostly be a luxury feel good item for the wealthy. Anyone outside of the elite simply won't be able to afford to go fully solar with an electric car, etc.

Which means we're on gas. And prices for gas will have to get astronomic before it will overwhelm the price advantage that gas has over electric.

My part of the country gets about 5% of our electricity from coal. The largest share (though not the majority) is natural gas, with big chunks of hydro, nuclear, and small but growing chunks of wind and solar and biomass/landfill gas. The carbon intensity of the electricity in my region per usable energy (say, per mile the vehicle can go) is less for electric than for gasoline, by a pretty wide margin.

Furthermore, if a person has PV panels on his own house, he can legitimately claim that his vehicle is low carbon emissions even if he does live in Kentucky or Ohio or Arizona or any other significantly-coal-dependent state.

Furthermore, coal plants are being retired all around the country. There's currently about 300 GW of coal fired capacity in tUSA -- by 2020 it will be closer to 220 GW. Folks who want less carbon emissions are opposed to building new capital infrastructure which will facilitate more carbon emissions for decades to come. Those folks would rather spend money (and create jobs) building wind turbines and solar farms and expanding subway and bus lines and switching more truck delivery to rails and switching from the manufacturing of gasoline fired autos to electric vehicles.

The folks who oppose the Keystone aren't in favor of coal fired electric power plants. That's pretty freaking obvious.

ironically, yes. If his car uses an electric motor driven by batteries, and the batteries are charged via a connection to his electric utility, and the utility generates electricity by burning coal.... Then his car is, indirectly, steam powered.

In the present day, the steam plant is located far from the occupants of the car, thus the cars are safer. But otherwise, it's the exact same technology. That's progress(tm)!

Come to think of it, have we made any really startling breakthrus since the internal combustion engine and computer itself? I mean, other than obvious stuff like improving those gadgets and linking them together.

Nuclear is a fairly startling breaktrough, although it uses steam for power generation. And solar. Get fusion working, and it will be a big change (but again, it will use steam).

There are ways to directly generate electricity from fusion reactions. Lawrence Livermore Laboratories actually demonstrated it in the lab and came out with greater than 85% efficiency from this system (heat-based systems max out near 50%). Before I'm criticized for even mentioning it, yes, it's more complicated and difficult that just hooking up a turbine. It's still feasible, and should not be dismissed out-of-hand as an area of research in fusion power generation. In the long run, it would be much cheaper.

What you fail to realize is that most of them could care less if the oil companies get rich or not. They are more concerned with controlling you and getting your vote. The evil oil companies is just a windmill for you to tilt at while they cheer you on claiming to do something about it while you gladly vote for them.

What you fail to realize is that most of them could care less if the oil companies get rich or not. They are more concerned with controlling you and getting your vote.

Painfully facile, even for you. You could try and make counter-arguments that the mining of the tar sands wont trash the environment, that the pipeline will somehow be built without eminent domain, that the constant leaks that happen with every other pipeline of length wont happen with this one, how the processed fuel wont be the dirtiest pe

What the anti oil people have failed to grasp is that they're making the oil companies rich at everyone else's expense.

This is not about facts. It is about a litmus test of ideological purity. Like spotted owls [wikipedia.org] and SDI [wikipedia.org], it has taken on so much symbolic importance as a political dog fight that the underlying facts no longer matter at all.

Even wealthy people with aspirations to roles as activists only have so much time and energy to throw at this part of themselves, the part that needs to be seen as doing the good work. Anything packaged as "Save The Earth" catches their interest instinctively.

The article postulates the Dems are trying to pacify the environmental flag wavers by not signing until after the next election cycle, an eerie parallel to the Republican need to court the far right during Presidential primaries and then distance the

And it makes sense to appease the environmentalists on this one - It creates few permanent American jobs and they are shipping and refining a corrosive, dirty form of oil (and is awful at the field, as you mention). That oil isn't even going to be used in the US - it is destined for use mainly in South America. So the US bears all the risk, gets almost no return and Canada reaps the profits. If I were Obama, I'd punt on this too - no reason to piss off the environmentalist Dems for a bunch of short term job

If thats the only 'fact' supporting why it should be approved, then it should not be.

This is why US law permits what it doesn't explicitly ban. So people like you can't just block things without a reason. Making money is not something that just magically happens. It occurs for two reasons, either someone is providing a service of value and receiving adequate compensation for it. Or someone is forcing someone to buy their shit. Making money in the absence of coercion implies that a good or service of value is being traded voluntarily.

Self-correcting is relative to time. Many make the assumption that the time base is short and so destructive policies will have relatively immediate consequences. This is what confuses the global climate debate and the argument that when it gets hot enough, we'll switch to something non-carbon based. If the time base is short, that might work. However, if what we pump now means a runaway greenhouse effect 20-30 years from now, then we're screwed 20-30 years from now and no amount of "market forces" will fix

As it gets more expensive, there is economic pressure to use less, or to find more efficient ways to use the energy available.

Oil (and consequently, refined petroleum products) has gotten more expensive because of speculation.There was a hearing a few years back and at least one oil company exec came out and said oil shouldn't cost more than $65/barrel.Further, he pointed out that no oil companies were interested in exploiting wells that would cost more than $80/barrel.Because $80 is what the oil industry sees as near the maximum market value for oil in the future.The entire difference between $65 and the spot price is market spec

Every action that increases the cost of gasoline increases the profit in producing it.

I know a guy who runs a sandwich shop. Next time I see him I'll tell him to throw away 50% of his ingredients, leave the ovens on full even when he's closed and take on employees whose sole function is to break things.

Keystone is at best a waste for America and at worst a natural disaster waiting to happen. It's a pipeline down to Mexican refineries so Canada can sell cheap tar sands oil to China. The problem is it's a _long_ pipe line, and they have a history of breaking and nobody noticing (since it costs lots of $$$ to monitor them) until after a community's ground water is heavily contaminated. If it happens in a mid sized town or city where it's too expensive to buy everyone out those people are just screwed.

1. The oil will be sold where they want to sell it regardless. They're currently shipping it through other pipelines and ferrying it by truck where there are no links. You did not stop the flow.

2. The canadians can build their own export facilities in Canada entirely bypassing the US. The canadians already take your position as a betrayal of our shared economic arrangement. The deal was that we'd provide certain assets to them and in return we got first bid on resources. You've made liars of us and the cana

Canada can build their own export facilities and deal with the environmental mess when their pipeline bursts (and their taxpayers can pick up that bill.

The problem isn't just that it's not _benefiting_ America, the problem is that it's not benefiting America AND there's a substantial risk that there will be a large scale environmental disaster that the company who owns the pipeline will never pay to clean up.

2. The canadians can build their own export facilities in Canada entirely bypassing the US. The canadians already take your position as a betrayal of our shared economic arrangement. The deal was that we'd provide certain assets to them and in return we got first bid on resources. You've made liars of us and the canadians are not happy about it.

Previously, then-Representative Markey challenged TransCanada on this question at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on December 2, 2011. There he asked Alexander Pourbaix, TransCanada's President of Energy and Oil Pipelines, whether he would commit to including a requirement in TransCanada's long-term contracts with Gulf Coast refineries, as a condition of shipping, that all refined fuels produced from oil transported through the Keystone XL pipeline be sold in the United States. In response, Mr. Pourbaix stated "no, I can't do that."

Go ahead, build your own export facilities and ship the stuff to China.I'd much rather Canada not externalize the environmental cost of that infrastructure onto the USA.

What the anti-oil people also fail to grasp is not building Keystone does not prevent Canada from exploiting the tar sands. It just means we lose another ally, while China builds the more expensive pipeline and shipping channel through Hudson's Bay.

Except that there's no profit to be made in distribution. Even refineries all over the world are struggling to make profits.Most oil companies derive some 60-70% of their profit from digging the crap out of the ground. Refineries needs to be spectacularly well placed to make a profit refining which is becoming more of a rarity reserved for some of the super-refineries around the world, like the Reliance facility in Indonesia which was the catalyst for closures of some 7 refineries in the Australiasian regio

Every action that increases the cost of gasoline decreases the consumption.

Oil has a very flat demand curve. When the price doubled from $2 to $4 per gallon, demand went down about 3%. In the long run, people will buy more efficient cars and change their commuting patterns, but in the short run most people have no choice but to just suck it up and pay.

America produces most, but not all, of the oil it consumes. The oil companies make WAY more profit on domestically produced oil, because foreign governments capture most of the profit on their oil exports. If demand drops due to higher prices, the oil companies import less foreign oil (the least profitable) and make a windfall on domestic oil.

Speaking of profits....I live in the Northeast, where we have high gasoline taxes. The "greedy oil companies" make about7 cents on every gallon sold. The state and Fed governments make over 30 cents per gallon sold. So who's "greedy" ?The suppliers of a needed commodity? Or our governments, who did NOTHING to make that energy available to the rest of us,except give their "permission" to sell it?

High fuel prices decrease fuel consumption for poor people, rich people don't care they drive the most inefficient vehicles.https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/best/bestworstNF.shtml Never mind the private jets and yachts but they are important they need those thing. Or cargo ships being exempt from fuel tax, take away the free trade agreements and tax exemptions and shipping stuff from China in not profitable anymore. "Just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760m

If you want to know what Jesus would say and do you should read The Bible yourself. He's quoted heavily in the first half of the New Testament. Don't listen to what Christians these days say he would or wouldn't do or say. Obviously they don't actually read it themselves and don't know because you have gained a seriously warped idea of what Jesus actually stood for. Most of the lessons his famous parables are meant to teach were actually economic nature.

Even if you adjust for inflation gas has increased in cost substantially. If the price of gas dropped to what it was 10 years ago adjusted for inflation most of the fracking operations around the US would be unprofitable.

These people don't understand that the market is a dynamic system. You change one thing and everything responds to it. They keep treating prices like static qualities that will sit still when you change things allowing them to patiently arrange everything one bit at a time until its just ho

... You say that but you don't give me any way to even estimate what you mean by inflation.

Please give me a baseline.

And understand, that is more expensive in real terms which is proven by the fact that oil companies are finding previously unprofitable drilling methods to be reasonable due to higher prices. That means in real terms the price has increased.

If you say its 100 percent inflation then you're just foaming at the mouth.

"It seems he likes to make all of his decisions" to benefit other countries and political systems, including Islam and Putin, in like "Tell Vlad I'll have more room to work with him after the elections."

"He" is not operating in the best interests of the U.S. in any way I can see

Hey, cut him some slack, he's evolving. One doesn't evolve overnight, it requires mediation time, time to kick the can down the road, time to figure out how to procrastinate in the hopes the current problem will go away all by itself due to magical influences such as pixie dust and clicking one's glittering slippers while uttering "We're not in Chicago anymore".

The man just has no balls. If he did, he'd make a call, one way or the other. If he believes one choice or the other is the "right thing" to do, for the environment or for the country, he should make the call regardless of the political risk.

It is pretty undisputed that the environmental impacts of building the pipeline are minimal, but don't strawman that as the only issue.The bigger issue is that the pipeline is being built by a private corporation (TransCanada) which will be using it to confiscate U.S. land (part of immenent domain) at the expense of the U.S. in economic development, and if something were to fail in the pipeline or be targeted, it would hurt the U.S. and the onus would be on us to repair the environmental damage.

The bigger issue is that the pipeline is being built by a private corporation (TransCanada) which will be using it to confiscate U.S. land (part of immenent domain) at the expense of the U.S. in economic development, and if something were to fail in the pipeline or be targeted, it would hurt the U.S. and the onus would be on us to repair the environmental damage.

TransCanada will NOT confiscate US land, and has ZERO ability to implement eminent domain. The localities/States that work together to implement the utility of the pipeline do have the power of eminent domain, and can use it to clear the way for the pipeline (a utility). And that does not leave TransCanada off the hook for any environmental damage from the pipeline. Ask any pipeline owner about eminent domain and their legal obligations to maintaining the pipeline and the land it uses.

What they need to do is build refineries in North Dakota, where there is plenty of oil, and also natural gas to power them.We don't want all the refining capacity of the nation to be in the Gulf where it could be all shut down by a hurricane. (stronger and more frequent due to climate change)

This makes sense, but refineries takes years to build and perhaps a decade to come online. They also need to be built next massive water resources (which is why so many in the gulf are next to the Mississippi river) for cooling purposes and barge access.

This. It would talk longer to build the refinery than it would to build a transcontinental pipeline. In addition, if you think they're having problems trying to build a pipe from Canada to Texas to flow crude oil, wait till they try to build a large refinery in ND and then build the pipeline to carry the processed output across country. You'll have people pulling the NIMBY card for the refinery. The same people trying to stop the crude pipeline, trying to stop the gasoline pipeline. And lots of others complaining about the increased truck and train traffic carrying the hazardous chemical secondary production outputs and byproducts.

If you're going to extract tar sands of their crude, then refining the crude in ND doesn't change anything. You've still got to ship liquid petroleum products from ND to the rest of the country -- and, in fact, the rest of the world since the USA is a net exporter of refined crude -- be it pipe, rail, or truck. Moving the refinery doesn't change the need for transport.

I think the OP is taking about skipping tar sands and refining the oil and gas in North Dakota. On the US side of the border there's hundred of BILLIONS of barrels of sweet light crude. Not to mention trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. So far the only pipeline out of there goes to a superior Wisconsin refinery. And that's just for the oil. Natural gas is just burned off. There's no pipelines currently to move the crude to the major refining states. It has to be moved via rail and truck, which is

Well, the Green River Formation shale oil [wikipedia.org] alone is around 3 trillion barrels, meaning we could feed the petroleum needs of the entire US off the Green River shale oil alone, and export the other 8-9 million barrels a day we produce, for the next 270+ years.

California and Texas need to learn two words: De-Salination. yes, it's expensive. You got choices... Thirst and dead crops or spend money on desalination plants. Well, there are two more options... (1) Invent a method to alter weather patterns and steal someone else's rain. or. (2) declare independence and go to war with the U.S., annex neighboring states and pipeline water from the Mississippi directly to Texas.

Just make it illegal to use water for fracking and agriculture while there's a drought on and you'll have plenty of water for people to drink. Oh, you really want the water to support those industries? Let industry pay for what it costs to get it if they rely on it so much.

Yep, and where would this water come from? The Great Lakes perhaps...not on your grandmother's grave. The Great Lake states will not allow you to decrease the water level of those lakes because they need them for shipping. Aquifers? The farmers in Nebraska, Oklahoma Arkansas, and Texas are already draining the Ogallala Aquifer. And due to the drier conditions in those states due to increased temperature lately, the aquifer is not getting replenished as it should. The Mississippi River, see the Great Lakes.

Desalination, It can be done for $10/month per person [wikipedia.org], which is quite affordable. Texas (and California) have massive coastlines with an essentially infinite supply of water - just an excess of salt.

Texas, like California, does NOT have a lack of water problem. It has an overabundance of water - which is contaminated with a high level of salt. A nuclear reactor next to a massive RO plant would provide Texas (and California) with all the fresh water it could ever want, at extremely competitive costs (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Economics">around $10/month per person).

I read a book a while ago that dealt with that problem. A guy hauled an iceberg from Antarctica to the Gulf of Mexico, and used the empty oil pipelines from the oil boom time to push water to all parts of Texas and the Midwest.

Mitch McConnell is a riot. Always when the turtleman speaks one should verify the facts and when you look at the data [transcanada.com] from no other than TransCanada about the number of *permanent* jobs this specific pipleline will add to the US economy it tops out at around 3600. Meanwhile you have Americans suing to not have that pipeline cross their land or have their land commandeered by the federal government.

North Dakota has saturated rail and road traffic trying to get it's crude out of the state. At the same time Natural gas is simply being burned off because there's no pipeline infrastructure to transport it. Pipelines that were being used to transport natural gas to the midwest from the east coast and gulf states will no longer be able to be used next year because they are being converted for use in transporting chemicals needed for tar sand conversion in Canada.

The reason big oil companies want the pipeline from Canada and not North Dakota is because there's a multibillion dollar tax loophole related to foreign oil processed in US refineries for export. Which is why the pipeline runs to the coast. Keystone Excel will have no effect on US fuel prices because it's not designed to sell fuel on the US market. It's quite likely that Keystone will result in refining capacity being taken out of the US market as it's used for export. All the signs point to this project actually costing the tax payer more at the pump in the end.

Let's also not forget the natural gas problems this creates for the upper midwest. They currently get their natural gas from Canada. Tar sand production need incredible amounts of natural gas. That's expected to increase prices people will be paying to heat their home. At the same time there's no plans now or in the future to bring more natural gas to upper midwest from the east coast. If anything they are losing capacity in order to support the tar sand production.

Under current law the US has many 70s era export controls. Frankly there are a bunch of US only makers for petro products and finished fuels. Occasionally we have times when gas is relatively cheap in the US compared to the rest of the world. Albeit rare, usually only when the US economy slows leading to excess gasoline at refineries. Gasoline that cannot be exported. This isn't entirely uncommon in the world. For instance China is a big fan of acquiring the oil rights bypassing the market and settin

I would have loved to been a fly on the wall in Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office when this non-decision was announced. Obama has once again taken the cowardly way out and punted a tough decision. He wants to continue to fundraise from environmentalists by saying "We're being tough on the Keystone pipeline and insisting it meets our environmental standards!" and then do the same with the big business crowd by saying, "We haven't said no to Keystone, we just want to make sure it meets our environmental standards." He doesn't actually want to make the decision, because then one crowd or the other will tell him to pound sand. Even though the entire job of being President of the United States is about making those decisions!

He wants to continue to fundraise from environmentalists by saying "We're being tough on the Keystone pipeline and insisting it meets our environmental standards!" and then do the same with the big business crowd by saying, "We haven't said no to Keystone, we just want to make sure it meets our environmental standards."

You forgot the blue-collar unions. They are very pro-Keystone, and he doesn't want to alienate them further, ahead of the 2014 mid-terms. So he's delaying screwing them until afterwards.

I like how articles forget to mention that the State Dpt. reports were made up of people who had ties to, or paid by those in the gas and oil industry. That is why environmentalists are still up in arms. Feel free to look up who put the report together and see who they work for. It's all there.

I'm all for the End of Oil. But the tar-sands vilification got so it pissed me off and I find myself in a surprising place - in the trench with companies I've never liked. What gets to me:

- Greenpeace created the "world's dirtiest oil" moniker with a large, sustained media campaign. I'm amazed it survived the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. I mean, really, it's worse than just spewing a fantastic amount of raw crude right into one of the world's most fecund ocean biomes and commercial fisheries, no way to clean it up at all? Greenpeace isn't a bunch of guys around a card table anymore, their budget is $300M/year. They love theatrical campaigns more than scientific ones; it's about what creates emotion, not real ecological results.

- Presuming (perhaps, a big presumption) that we keep on top of them with regulation, the open-pit mines are eventually filled back in and trees stuck on top - the ones where they've already done it are of course the first stop on the tour. Yes, the current mines are 200 sq. mi., "you can see them from space"...where they look like a brown postage stamp on a green billiards table, the boreal forest being over 200,000 sq.mi. Know what else is 200 sq. mi. or so? New York City, which was a rich hunting and fishing land of the Manhattan Indians. It's not being restored to forest any time soon, because it provides living space for 8 million people, rather than 8000 Manhattans. The tar sands are providing what currently is an (unfortunate) necessity of life for 20 million people.

- Accounts vary (for some reason) but I tend to trust New Scientist Magazine as pretty objective - their figure was that it takes the release of 70kg of carbon to extract tar sands oil, compared to 50kg for conventional. But both barrels are then *burned* releasing 200-300kg (depends on gas/diesel/etc), so the total lifecyle increase of carbon is under 10%. Yes, that's bad, but concentrating all hatred of carbon onto one source of it is, again, theatre, not science. It's like banning 3000lb SUVs and feeling very virtuous as you buy a 2700 lb SUV.

- But above all, picking on these companies and their pipeline schemes is attacking the *producer*, not the consumption end. Speaking of "America is addicted to oil", how has that strategy worked out for the War on Drugs? It's funny, the same very liberal folks who will shake their heads at the raw stupidity of the Drug War ("all it does is drive up the costs and bring in more ruthless producers to fill the hole") imagine it will work on energy that everybody wants to buy.

I'm all for shutting down the tar sands - but by hitting the consumption end, with research and incentives for batteries, electric cars, thorium and fusion power plants...the latter having the much greater benefit of first killing off coal-powered electric generation, a greater greenhouse issue than all oil. But when the inflection point hits with electric transportation and oil consumption actually goes *down*, the most expensive sources (tar sands) will be the first ones shuttered. Speed the day.

PS: Yes, I'm from Calgary. But I don't work in oil/gas, nor does anybody close to me. This is not as much about Canada as you may imagine. Almost all the $200B invested up there is from American companies. We barely tax them - less for oil than Palin's Alaska or Cheney's Wyoming. Our cut was just jobs building it. My family pioneered Alberta for two generations before oil was discovered - and they'll be around after it's all gone. Good riddance; but the ridding has to *work*. To make it work, we have to change a whole technological base of a society, not just rail at scapegoats.

Thanks to the EPA and the power of NIMBYs, it's basically impossible to build a new refinery in the US.

Yep, the NIMBYs and BANANAs will scream "No, no, no, no dangerous pipeline, no smelly industries or farms, no ugly windmills or cell towers". Then in the next breath they'll be "Why are we importing all this food and energy? We should buy local. And why does my cell phone reception suck?" And they'll never make the connection, ever.